The Naive and Sentimental Lover (19 page)

 

Or perhaps, Cassidy reflected, gazing at the prints of deformed race horses, he never existed at all, save in the sad, imagined places of her childhood.

 

A. L. Rowse never came either. He was in America giving a course of lectures. He didn't send a present but Daddy (who had intercepted the invitation) explained they knew one another far too well for that kind of silly formality. The bridesmaid was your Auntie Snaps, Mummy's sister, fifteen and very premature in low red velvet, and Auntie Snaps sulked all through the ceremony. A few weeks later, back at boarding school, she gave her maidenhead to a labourer in the potting shed. “
You
do it,” she told Mummy. “So why the hell shouldn't I?”

As a religious ceremony the service reminded Daddy of his Confirmation: an awesome contract with someone he did not know. And he could not help wishing, as the processive anthems drove him into the daylight, that he had not been quite so taken with Jean Gabin.

But Mark, tell me. Is this love? After all,
you're
innocent,
you
should know. You see, just possibly it's all there is; the best the world has got, and all the rest is waiting, like Daddy is waiting now.

Goodnight, Mrs. Harabee.

Goodnight, Flaherty.

Goodnight, Sandra.

Love, goodnight.

A
nd incredibly, back in London, Cassidy waited still.

“You've got a simply smashing horoscope,” said Miss Mawdray.

Breasts like doves, he thought, lusting after her in his idleness, little beaks pecking the angora. Legs of a boy, hips of a whore, hoares and hips; joke. God knows what she can wear up there. No white or black to mark the spot; just the burry brown fog of a touched-out photograph, a vaginal phantom yet to be recorded . . . Ha! See how she folds her thighs to embrace the unseen member!

“I got a new book,” Angie explained, meaning magazine.

He was standing at the familiar window. His desk repelled him, a symbol of sedentary inertia. Miss Mawdray, having no such inhibitions, was balanced on her babychair.

“I could do with a bit of luck,” Cassidy confessed.

She began reading him a long prophecy; it must have been half a page. He heard it at a distance, believing nothing. His birth group had been singled out, she said; special consideration for the Scales. Commerce would smile on him, she promised, friendships would flourish; have courage, she exhorted, go forward, advance, thrust, brandish. Do not allow unnecessary hindrances to impede you, impediments to hinder you, obstacles to obstruct you: a rare constellation would bless all initiatives.

“
All?
” Cassidy repeated, being jocular. “Well, well, I must try some new ones.”

“And in the field of love,” she read, keeping her head well down and following the line with her finger as her voice became slightly louder, “Venus and Aphrodite will jointly smile on your boldest venture.”

“Fine,” said Cassidy. “Just fine. Why don't they clean these curtains?” he asked, tugging at the net.

“They've just been done,” said Angie with spirit. “You know very well they have. You were only complaining last week they'd been taken down.”

Cassidy did not care for that kind of reply.

“Tell me,” he said casually, his back still turned towards her, “what's happened to your engagement ring?”

He would not have asked, but for her retaliation. “Your engagement ring,” he insisted, turning now and pointing to the extra quarter-inch of nakedness. “You haven't
lost
it, have you, Angie? That would be very bad.”

“I'm just not wearing it, am I?” she said in a small voice, and though she must have known that he was still facing her, did not lift her head.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I didn't mean to pry.”

Hangdog, he returned to the window. A scene, he thought glumly, we're going to have a scene. I've been an oaf again and now she's hurt. The last scene had involved Meale, he remembered; Angie had wanted Cassidy to provide an excuse for her not to accept an invitation from him and he had declined.

“You must get out of it for yourself,” he had told her, Cassidy the champion of plain dealing. “If you don't like him, tell him. He'll only go on asking you if you don't.” Well now he had made a second, equally unfortunate sally into her private life, and he was about to pay the price.

He waited.

“I wear it when I feel like it,” said Angie at last, to his back. Her voice was still quiet, but it was already breaking with anger. “And if I don't feel like it I won't bloody bother, so sod it.”

“I have apologised,” the Chairman reminded her.

“I don't mind if you have or not. I'm not interested in apology am I? I've gone off him, that's all, and it's none of your business.”

“I'm sure it's just a tiff,” Cassidy assured her. “It'll blow over, you'll see.”

“It
won't,
” she insisted, furious. “I don't want it to blow over. He's rotten in bed and he's rotten out of it, so why
should
I marry him if I don't want to?”

Not quite certain whether to believe the evidence of his ears, Cassidy remained silent.

“They're too young,” said Angie, smacking her book on her knee. “I get bloody sick of them. They all think they're marvellous and they're just
babies.
Fucking selfish, silly
babies.
”

“Well,” said Cassidy stalking the safety of his desk. “I don't know about
that,
” and laughed, as if ignorance were a joke. “Angie, do you often swear like that?”

She rose in a single movement, taking his cup with one hand and tugging at the hem of her skirt with the other. “Not unless I'm goaded, do I?”

“How was the dentist?” he asked, hoping by small talk to restore a certain formality.

“Smashing,” she said, with a sudden very tender smile. “I could have eaten him alive, honest.”

Cassidy's dentist; part of a private health scheme for the staff. A man of forty-five; married.

“Good.”

He made the next question even more casual: “Any messages at all . . . nothing out of the way?”

“A daft parson rang, that's all. Wanting free prams for orphans. I put a note on your desk. Irish.”

“Irish? How do you know?”

“Because he spoke Irish, silly.”

“He didn't leave a message?”

“No.”

Warmer. “He didn't leave his number?”

“Look, he was daft, I told you! Lay off.”

She gazed at him, her hand resting on the door handle, an angel of puzzled compassion.

“If you'd tell me what it is, Aldo,” she said at last very quietly, “I'd know what to look for, wouldn't I?”

The resentment, the aggression had all gone. Only a childish supplication remained. “I'm dead safe, honest, Aldo. You can tell me
anything,
they wouldn't drag it out of me, no one would. Not if it's about you.”

“It's personal,” said Cassidy at last, his tongue clicking awkwardly on the dry roof of his mouth. “It's something very personal. Thanks.”

“Oh,” said Angie.

“Sorry,” said Cassidy, and returned to his curtained window on an unresponsive world.

 

And still waiting, went to a crucial dinner at the unstately home of Dr. John and Somebody Elderman.

Mrs. Elderman was a sublimated graduate and the leader of the local dramatic set; while to her husband fell the important rôle of Cassidy's medical advisor. The Cassidys had not so much met the Eldermans as descended to them, gone back to them, as it were, when brighter social hopes had been extinguished. John Elderman was a small man physically, and though meticulously faithful to his general practice, was known to read widely on the subject of the mind. Some years back, he had written a paper called “Positive Divorce,” and the tear-sheets were still generously displayed in every avant-garde room. Since then, the Eldermans had been much consulted in the Crescent, not only by the Cassidys, and they enjoyed a great reputation in the field of marriage guidance, and in all matters relating to love. Their principle, where Cassidy had met it, was to urge self-expression in the interests of self-discipline; no one, they insisted, was
obliged
to be unhappy; love was a gift, derived from flowers and rock.

The obscurity of this advice was deepened by the figure of Mrs. Elderman, a very big woman who wore gowns of brown hemp and ran a tangled garden on lines laid down by Rudolph Steiner. Her hair, which was mainly grey, similarly flourished. Separated rather than parted, it was bonded with flax on either side, like two enormous eggtimers made of steel wool. Loathing her, Cassidy had permanently forgotten her first name.

Even before they arrived there, the occasion had taken on for Cassidy a quality of dream-like frightfulness. He had come home late, by way of the Audley Arms, after a long and exceptionally tiresome meeting of his Export Ginger Group, and Sandra accused him of smelling of drink.

“How many did you have?”

“One. But it was meths.”

“How
can
you be so cheap?”

“Have one yourself. Plenty in the broom cupboard.”

“You wouldn't find it
in
you, would you, to tell me what on
earth
is making you so bad-tempered?”

“Spring,” said Cassidy, scrubbing his teeth. From the main drawing room came a sudden burst of machine-gun fire. “What the
hell's
that?”

“What's
what?
”

“That hammering. Who's at the gates for Christ's sake?” He knew very well what it was.

“The workmen are putting up a moulding. An eighteenth-century
moulding
which Heather and I bought two
months
ago from a breaker's yard for ten shillings. I've told you about it fifty times; but still.”

“Ten bob!” He used his Jewish rag-trade voice. “Ten bob for the moulding, fine. Ten bob I can afford. But Christ Almighty what about the
labour
already?”

“Do you mind speaking properly?”

“It's after five o'clock, those lads are getting about twenty guineas an hour!”

Sandra chose silence. He returned to his East End Jewish.

“So will somebody tell me what the hell's the point of an eighteenth-century moulding in a nineteenth-century house? Everyone knows this place is Victorian except us, ask a rabbi.”

Still she chose silence.

“I mean
Christ,
” Cassidy demanded of the bathroom mirror, in which, like a female sentinel before the doors of Downing Street, Sandra waited vertical and motionless.

“
Christ,
” he repeated, in an Irish brogue he had been working on for several days. “I mean why the hell can't we live in the
twentieth
century for a change?”

“Because you're not to be trusted with it,” she snapped, and Cassidy secretly awarded her set and match. “And there's no post,” she added nastily, “if that's what you're bothered about.”

Cassidy, studiously applying lather, offered no reply.

“Anyway, why isn't Hugo in bed?” he asked, knowing that answer also.

“He's been invited.”

“What to?”

“The Eldermans'.
As
we have.
As
you know. If there's any point in going still,” she added looking at her watch.

The Eldermans had squadrons of children and dined early so that their guests could have the benefit.

“
Bloody
silly. Dinner for a kid of seven!
Needlessly exposing him to danger:
that's what it is. A doctor, I ask you. A fully fledged paid-up medic, even if he does come from Gerrard's Cross. What if Hugo falls over? What if he stubs his toe? What if he gets kicked? Hugo hates those children, you know he does. So do I. Otiose little prigs,” he said.

“You know what
I
think.” Sandra's mother, hovering thinly at their bedroom doorway, in blue-tinted glasses and a dress of little-girl yellow, gave a titter of terrified goodwill. “I think mercy and truth are married together.”

“Shut
up,
Mummy,” said Sandra.

“
Come
on, darlings,” her mother begged. “
Kiss.
I would at your age.”

“
Mummy,
” said Sandra.

“Darling, shouldn't you give something to the workmen?”

“He did,” Sandra snapped. “He gave them five pounds. He's utterly
gross.
”

 

They left in procession, five yards between each along the pavement, Cassidy carrying Hugo in his arms like a casualty of war, and Sandra's mother bringing up the rear, jingling precariously in her cowbell jewellery.

“At least he's a
doctor,
darling,” she called enticingly to Cassidy over her daughter's head.

“Aldo
hates
doctors,” Sandra retorted. “You know he does. Except specialists of course,” she added nastily. “
Specialists
can do no wrong, can they? Specialists are absolutely perfect, even if they do charge fifty guineas for an X-ray.”

“Why's Mummy cross?” Hugo asked from inside the blanket.

“Because Daddy's been drinking,” Sandra snapped.

“She's not cross,” said Cassidy. “It's just Granny getting on her nerves,” and pressed the bell marked “House.”

“Bet you've got the wrong evening,” said Sandra.

“Greetings old man!” John Elderman cried. Perhaps to augment his height, he wore a chef's hat. From beneath it pinkfringed eyes of palest blue regarded Cassidy with innocent sagacity. He stood very straight, thin shoulders braced, but the effort did him little good.